Almost to the day two years after Microsoft announced the shutdown of their ambitious Popfly project, this site resurrects at least the idea. Launched in May 2007, Microsoft Popfly provided a platform that allowed users to create everything from games and small programs to mashups and web pages.

Having set up a profile, users were assigned 100 MB of space to store and share whatever they created. One popular product coming out of the Popfly project were little gadgets that could be placed on the sidebar in Windows. Using the Microsoft Silverlight technology, creators Adam Nathan and John Montgomery did capture the spirit of the time for a little while.

Despite this success the project was discontinued, probably for financial reasons, when Microsoft announced a series of cuts which killed more than just the Popfly-project. “If you want to keep programming, use Kudo or Scratch,” Microsoft succinctly announced and it was over. By August 24, 2009, users could no longer sign in or access their work.

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F.A.Q.

Q: What problem is Popfly Space trying to solve?
A: Popfly Space is a social network designed to connect the millions of non-professional creators in the world who work on everything from mashups to game development to hardware hacks. Users can build and share projects using Popfly Creator, or for more advanced users, Popfly Space provides an easy way to upload and share Visual Studio Express projects to the world. For JavaScript/CSS/HTML developers, it provides a free “playground” to build and share fun Web experiences. It’s the “YouTube for applications” where you can discover, rate, comment, and remix everything.

Q: Why did you call it Popfly?
A: Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.